Locked in limbo: the prolonged detention of stateless people in Europe must end now

Some stateless people are detained for months, even years, without any
real prospect of their cases being resolved. This must change.

Detention centre gates. Photo: Greg Constantine for European Network on Statelessness.A
consensus is building in Europe that the current use of immigration
detention is unsustainable, harmful, and, in many cases, unlawful.

Today,
a statement
signed by civil society organisations, lawyers and academics from
over 30 European countries, published as part of a new campaign
#LockedInLimbo,
calls on European governments to
comply with their international human rights obligations which
strictly prohibit arbitrary detention.

It
highlights the fact that hundreds of stateless people are detained
for months, even years, without any real prospect of their cases being resolved. This is because immigration systems do not have
appropriate procedures in place to identify those who are left
without nationality and to protect stateless people.

Stateless
people are not recognised as a citizen by any state. As such they are
denied basic rights that most people take for granted. Statelessness
is a legal anomaly, with devastating consequences on the lives of
those caught up in it.

Statelessness
is a legal anomaly, with devastating consequences...

Stateless
people are particularly vulnerable to finding themselves deprived of
their liberty and locked up in immigration detention while
authorities attempt to deport them. But because there is no country
that will accept them, authorities will rarely actually be able to do
so. In such cases, where deportation is impossible, the prolonged and
repeated detention of stateless people is not only pointless, but
also most likely unlawful.

Statelessness
affects more than 10 million people around the world and at least
600,000 in Europe. Statelessness occurs in Europe both among recent
migrants and people who have lived in the same place for generations.
While these numbers give an indication of the scale of statelessness
in the region, more precise data is sparse and often incomplete.

In
Ukraine, for instance, there is no reliable data on the size of the
stateless population and estimates range from 6,500 to close to
50,000, while in Bulgaria people in detention are often simply
assigned a nationality by the authorities according to where they are
deemed to have come from, making official statistics unreliable.

Worryingly,
new research
and analysis
by the European Network on Statelessness and its member
organisations, based on over 60 interviews across six European
countries points to a small number of stateless people exposed to
prolonged and repeated detention because their statelessness is
invisible to the authorities, or their stories are not believed.

Muhammed,
one of the people interviewed in the UK, told us: “Detention made
my mental health worse. It started when I got into detention. There,
they do not care if you cry.”

There,
they do not care if you cry...

Muhammed
is a Sahrawi – from
Western Sahara in north-west Africa – in his late
thirties, who came to the UK as a minor. He was refused asylum and
has been detained several times for a total of nearly four of the
last 18 years. He also applied for status as a stateless person but,
as per UK rules, his application was refused because he has a past
criminal offence.

The
authorities did accept that he was Sahrawi, making deportation
impossible. However, he still spent 15 months in detention in
2015-2016 alone.

Angela
is an ethnic Armenian from Azerbaijan. She fled to the Netherlands
seeking asylum with her family in her early teens, but they were
refused protection. Countless efforts to obtain new travel documents
failed.

In
2012, Angela was detained during an attempt to forcibly remove her
family, which had a huge emotional impact on her. Both Armenia and
Azerbaijan refused to facilitate their deportation. A Dutch
court ruled her detention unlawful and suspended forced return –
but even this did not end her limbo.

Man in detention. Greg Constantine for European Network on Statelessness.Angela
and Mohamed’s stories are not unique and we heard numerous stories
of
suffering, and of great human cost. People’s lives are put on hold
while authorities try to deport them at the expense of their mental
health and wellbeing.

It
doesn't need to be this way.
As part of the #LockedInLimbo campaign, the European Network on
Statelessness has published a clear agenda
for change
which can help end this travesty.

The
experiences of the people we interviewed point to broken systems
characterised by mistrust, lack of awareness, and a failure to apply
established legal standards put in place to protect them. Authorities
are neglecting their obligations to protect people’s basic rights,
exposing them to arbitrariness, discrimination, and systemic
exclusion. Their ‘crime’? Having no place to call home and no
identity papers to prove it. Their ‘crime’? Having no place to call home and no papers to prove it.

Such failings push
stateless people onto the margins of Europe’s communities, towards
isolation, exploitation and petty ‘survival’ criminality, which
in turn can lead to apprehension and detention. Breaking this vicious
and discriminatory cycle requires urgent law and policy reform to
align national law and practice with regional and international human
rights standards.

It
is time for European states to fulfil their obligations towards
stateless people. The answer is a simple one: identification.

States
must urgently put in place effective procedures to identify
statelessness within their immigration and international protection
systems. If we can effectively identify who is stateless (or at risk
of statelessness), then steps can be taken to protect them from
unlawful and arbitrary detention, and free them from legal limbo
without a nationality to begin to rebuild their lives.

Immigration
detention should not be used as a tool to implement states’
migration policies. It has severe and long-lasting effects on the
mental health of people detained. While this is even more likely to
be the case for the stateless, for whom the prospects of being
deported are usually minimal, this only adds to the overall case for
a systemic overhaul of immigration detention and Europe’s approach
to migration.

About the author

Chris Nash is the Director and co-founder of the European Network on Statelessness. He has worked in the refugee and migration field for 18 years, initially as an asylum lawyer and then at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, the Refugee Council of Australia, Amnesty International and Asylum Aid. He has written widely on asylum, migration and statelessness policy, and is joint author of the 2011 UNHCR/Asylum Aid report Mapping Statelessness in the United Kingdom.

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